Did James Woods go QAnon by confusing character he played in 'White House Down' with real life?

Woods as Walker from Google images

I just had a really weird experience watching 2013 film "White House Down" about armed American insurgents storming the Capitol and James Woods is the bad guy. So Many scenes in the film are similar to what went down January 6th, home-grown terrorists barreling into places we hold sacred and desecrating artifacts. Only difference is in the movie they had machine guns, last week they wielded sticks and American flagpoles. BUT WEIRDEST OF ALL about the film is James Woods plays Martin Walker, director of White House security, who is actually the bad guy. Midway into the film he kidnaps the president after shooting all the Secret Service guys protecting him. Walker has conspired with attacking marauders who would be Proud Boys, if Proud Boys existed in 2013. They are all willing to shoot everyone and anyone. The amount of armament in the movie gets ridiculous after a while.

I was sad thinking James Woods is too good an actor for this film with what today are eerie scenes of Capitol Police doing the bidding of heavily armed terrorists. BUT WEIRDEST OF ALL is today Woods himself is a QAnon propagandist. The Jan 7 Twitter QAnon purge removed 63,000 of his followers. Before Jan 6 his Twitter was full of the rightest of the right political propaganda. Woods would repeat everything you heard on Fox News and later read on Parler. Now his tweets are about traveling Route 66… posted last year.

Did James Woods go QAnon by confusing the character he played in the 2013 film 'White House Down' with real life? Much like the film "A Double Life" (1947 written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin) where "A celebrated actor struggles to distinguish his own life from that of his most recent stage role, Othello." (IMDB)

I wonder if Woods went nuts after playing Walker and became the character who was so angry at USA he was ready to nuke American cities. And Iran. 

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One of Walker/Woods's last lines in the film is "Stand up, sir, history will judge who the true patriots were here today" delivered as he points a gun at the president, played by Jamie Foxx sounding in dialogue A Lot like Barack Obama.

At one point they bring in Walker's wife thinking she'll talk him down from his insurrection. Instead, looking eerily like the gun wielding new congresswoman from Colorado who aided the Jan 6 insurgency, Walker's wife aids the insurgency in the movie, saying, "Do whatever it takes, make them pay for what they did to our boy." Watching in January 2021 I got the chills. Too much of this film is like the events last week in D.C. and James Woods leading the siege really makes me wonder, how much did his making this film play into Woods's becoming an advocate for QAnon.

As always, Woods's performance is outstanding. The stuff he does with his eyes, his face, it's like more is going on inside his head than acting. Early in the film before he turns from hero to villain, his eyes only hint at the evil about to happen but they do hint. Watching him, I see he's internalized this character with the same rare acting ability he's had in all his films, which allows a complexity beyond the words on the script. 

Like all actors, Woods is required to inhabit the characters he plays, but considering what James Woods turned into by 2020, I wonder if something about "White House Down" made James Woods snap and confuse the role he was playing with real life. It did not help that the film came out in 2013, same year the information warfare attack on USA amped up on Fox News and everything that developed from the network's loins.

"Consider this my resignation," our complex antihero says as he shoots down every agent protecting the President.

Woods seems to have, in the movie and in real life, joined the insurrectionists. His character Walker leads the terrorists around the building. "Sweep the place and then you will come with me as planned," he calls to the invaders who, except for weapons and being less in number, look eerily like the guys who stormed the Capitol January 6th.

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Other parts of the film seem to prophecy what we experienced in USA last week. As we careen around the White House, TV monitors play the news channels where pundits talk and speculate. At one point we hear, "Why isn’t the military doing something?" words I heard multiple times January 6th as I watched the attack in real time.  Another news report that we hear, "The west gate of the White House is destroyed," makes terrorists in the room watching laugh demonically.

We see Woods at a desk popping prescription pills and yelling “I need him alive, that's an order!" looking Way Too Much like Donald Trump in mannerisms, and they must have been shooting "White House Down" in 2011-12, so, again, eerie.

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President: What mission? There were no nuclear weapons in Iran.

Walker: But there will be. The Middle East is our last war. It will be us or them. I choose that my son will be the last American soldier to die in that conflict in vain.

President: You want that as your son’s legacy, murdering millions of people in vain.

Walker: Stand up, sir, history will judge who the true patriots were here today.

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The domestic terrorist attack in "White House Down" starts when a guy with red hair and a long skinny face and body, looking much like James Woods as bad guy in The Onion Field in 1979, brings a bomb into the building and is able to leave it there. A great deal of the film is rat a tat machine gun, cars tanks and airplanes slamming into buildings, limousines chases, more machine guns and car chases with sprinkling of dialogue such as “blow these bastards off the roof” them boom more explosion noise.

I'm thinking, perhaps it was not just the collective deception of QAnon that got to James Woods, maybe it was the cacophony of this film.

Woods as Eddie Dodd

After James Woods had appeared in classics such as The Onion Field and Ghosts of Mississippi and True Believer, perhaps the noise barrage of guns and explosions of "White House Down" as he attended one screening after another in 2013 contributed to the brainwashing of James Woods along with QAnon et al.

Someday soon I hope he recovers. 

By Kay Ebeling

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PS:  if only Woods would morph into Eddie Dodd in True Believer instead-